The market for online application services is continuously growing and evolving. Many applications are available online that are offered on a subscription basis to individuals and businesses. A subset of the available online applications have become ubiquitous and necessary for just about any business, such as domain name services (DNS), email, and web hosting. Other online applications are useful to specific types of individuals and businesses, like web logs, user forums, team collaboration sites, document management platforms, or portal services. In addition, many applications traditionally implemented with in-house software and systems are now being offered online through the subscription model, such as office applications, accounting applications, and portfolio management services.
Online application service providers may offer packages of specific online applications that target particular types of subscribers. For instance, in addition to a standard business package of DNS, email, and web hosting applications, an online application service provider may offer a project management package for companies with individual project teams that adds team collaboration and document management applications, or a Blogger package for journalists that includes a web log application. In each of these cases, the resources allocated to each application may also be different depending on the target subscriber. For example, the project management package may offer subscribers one domain name with up to 100 email mailboxes, 20 gigabytes (GB) of document storage and a 10 megabyte (MB) website, while the blogger package may only include 1 email mailbox but 5 domain names and a 50 MB website.
As conditions in the marketplace or costs of resources change, the online application service provider may desire to change the online applications that are packaged within a specific offer, or change the level of resources allocated to each online application in the package. These changes may be applied retroactively to all current subscribers to the package, or they may only apply to new subscribers. In addition, the online application service provider may offer subscribers the ability to add additional resources to each of the online applications in their subscribed package. For example, a subscriber to the blogger package may add additional email mailboxes or a subscriber to the project management package may add 20 MB of storage to their website.
The online application service provider may desire to offer a particular package to subscribers for free, or allow subscribers a free trial period before converting the subscription to paid once the trial period has expired. Further, many of the online applications may be provided by application providers external to the online application service provider. These application providers may specialize in a particular application, such as DNS services, or offer a particular resource, such as online storage. The online application service provider may offer packages to subscribers that include both internally provided online applications and those provided by external application providers.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is provided.